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Dave's Computer Musings.

Being a Set of Reminiscences Concerning the Author's Personal Experience of Computing

The Year 2000 and Beyond

Work in progress
WARNING: This page is under construction. Please proceed with caution.

And so, according to just about every government, every TV and Radio station, and every newspaper, we enter the Twenty First Century and the Third Millennium. It seems that the whole world has forgotten how to count - it's most annoying to one as pedantic as myself.

Even as I write this, I know that many people will remain convinced that the 21st Century and 3rd Millennium did, indeed, begin at 0000hrs on 1 January 2000. The explanation of when the centuries change, and why, doesn't really belong here. My rants page is a better place to discuss this (for those who are really interested!) - so that's another job I'll have to do when I get a Round Tuit.

Anyway, what we can all agree upon is that the 1990s have ended, and we're now in the... well, what do we call them? The Noughts? The Twenty Hundreds? The Two Thousands?

No doubt some name will emerge over the next few months and become accepted by common consensus. I'm not convinced that it should be "The Naughties", though.

The Millennium Bug

(... is something supposed to happen?)

As the 1990s drew to a close, something became apparent. Computers could only count up to ninety nine. Well, that wasn't quite true. It was we humans who were too idle to write down the full year in dates. Most of the time, there was no need. If someone says they were born in 72, it should be obvious that they don't mean 2072, and you only have to look at them to know that either a) they don't mean 1872 or b) the quest for the elixir of life has finally ended. So, it made sense, in the days when data storage was expensive, to write computer programs in a way that cut down on the amount of data that had to be stored, and one way of doing that is to leave off the century information from each date stored. Two digit dates are enough for most applications - if it's now March '89, that a can of food with a use-by date of April '88 is out of date, but one with a use-by date of July '90 is still wholesome.

Ten years later, in March '99, an April '98 can is out of date and a July '00 can is still in date. However, a computerised stock-checking system that simply compared year numbers would calculate that the July '00 can was almost 99 years out of date. A procedure to correct this situation (for example, by adding 100 years to any use-by date more than 80 years in the past) would be very simple - but as the year 2000 approached, concern grew that many programmers either had, or might have, neglected to include such a routine.

Not too much of a problem, you might at first think. After all, if your stock-checking program says a can is 99 years out of date, that's so obviously wrong that you'd check it, get the software upgraded to include a date correction, and keep going. It would hardly be the first time that a piece of computer software has proved to contain bugs.

What set this apart from the "normal" computer bug was that, potentially, all the computer programs that suffered from this problem would malfunction on the same day.

The worst-case scenario was that, as the clocks rolled from 23:59:59 on 31 January 1999 to 00:00:00 on 1 January 2000, a wave of computer failures would sweep across the world. Traffic lights would fail, bringing chaos to traffic systems. Bank computers would fail, wiping out bank accounts overnight. Telephone systems would stop working. ICBM systems would discount all the "Everything's OK, do not launch" signals apparently received a hundred years in the future. Avionics systems would fail, bringing planes crashing out of the sky. Electronic ignition systems in cars would stop working. Nuclear reactor control systems would go haywire. The electricity distribution system would collapse.

On the other hand, the best case scenario was that there would be a few irritating glitches, and the world would continue much as before, except that people would bore you for ages with their tedious Millennium Bug anecdotes. Much as I'm doing now, in fact.

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